Over the years, a wide variety of advertising methods employing graphic devices have been applied to packaging. Marks applied to packages include the trademark of a product contained within the package and are a common everyday experience. Examples include such diverse products as soft drinks, film, and cigars, all of which come in packages with their own particular type of markings.
In the most typical case, a cardboard package dedicated to a particular product is printed with information relating to that product. Thus, a package of film is printed with the number of exposures, the size of the frame, and the speed of the film. This information is valuable in the context of showing the contents of the box and provides for inventory control, advertisement of the mark of the maker, advertisement of the particular product enclosed, and so forth. Other related products may also be advertised on the box.
While there are a great many stock boxes available for packaging goods, because of the advantages associated with printed boxes dedicated to particular products, manufacturers almost always opt for a printed box. This is so even though such printed boxes are very expensive to manufacture, requiring such expensive tasks as the development of art suited to the box, and the use of a high quality material to make the box. For example, in a typical box of the corrugated cardboard type, the corrugated cardboard box would have an external veneer of high quality white paperboard laminated to the outside surface to receive the printing. Such paper board may be a coated stock and the box manufacturer may also apply a varnish to the surface to finish it.
While the finished product may be exceedingly attractive, the added costs associated with the use of higher quality materials, development of extensive amounts of color art, and finally the printing in full color of the boxes, make such packages a significant fraction of the product cost, as they often cost as much as five or ten times the cost of a plain box.
In the case of a corrugated cardboard box, which is typically of a size which results in a capacity of 1 to 20 cubic feet, the large size of the box presents a correspondingly large expense with respect to materials, art and printing plates. In addition to this, the thickness of the unprinted cardboard material presents special handling problems related to the necessity of keeping the material flat during printing, not degrading the corrugated cardboard structure, and running the printing machine at a relatively low speed which enables the consistent handling of a cumbersome piece of corrugated cardboard.
Indeed, because of the high cost of packages which include full color information, companies using these packages are often hesitant to discard them when products change or other things occur which require the labeling on the package be amended. Because of this, it is not unheard of to see packages on the shelves of stores which have stickers adhered over portions of their graphical or alphanumeric content for the purpose of covering incorrect data or putting correct or additional data on the box.
Such expedients are also resorted to when, even though the particular product involved and can easily support the economic costs associated with a box change, the change must be made promptly, and the expensive artwork, production tooling and scheduling, and so forth cannot be made quickly enough to accommodate the business needs associated with the change in packaging.
Because of these problems, numerous mechanisms have been utilized to avoid the delays and costs of printed packages. For example, food products are often sold in packages which are made of clear plastic and are marked with self-adhesive stickers made of paper or other similar material. However, this sort of approach looks odd when applied to other sorts of packages, such as corrugated cardboard cartons, opaque paperboard cartons, and other similar types of packages. In addition, the use of self-adhesive stickers also imposes significant additional costs, although the same are likely to be significantly less than the cost associated with custom full color product-specific packaging.
It is also known to apply graphic elements to boxes by printing these graphic elements on adhesive tape. Perhaps the most common of graphic elements which are imprinted on adhesive and non-adhesive members are package tampering warnings, such as “Do not use if seal is broken”.
It is also known to apply decorative graphic elements to adhesive tape. Such decorative graphic elements may comprise geometric patterns, bright colors, holiday or other occasion thematic elements, alphanumeric indicators and the like.